Best Trading Practices Through Crowdsourcing

Thanks once again to SMB Options Tribe for hosting yesterday's webinar on best practices in trading.  For those who could not attend live, here is the recording of the session. 

In that session, I suggested that a review of one's performance can be a great way to identify trading strengths and best practices.

But suppose we make that review a social process and ask a number of experienced traders to share a best practice.  While not every idea will resonate with every one of us, the crowdsourced list of worthwhile practices would provide fertile ground for expanding one's own processes.

So let's try a little crowdsourcing:

There is a tremendous amount of information on the financial web.  None of us could possibly read it all.  If, however, a number of informed traders suggested their favorite expert sites on particular topics, the result would be a nicely vetted set of information sources that could feed one's market intelligence.

I'll start with an example:

I mentioned a little while back that the website Abnormal Returns is part of my daily market preparation.  I have found that Tadas is both thorough and discerning in his selection of daily links across the landscape of financial journalism.  It doesn't make sense for me to review everything out there when someone with an informational edge is already doing a good job of curating content.  Yes, there are things I look at independently, but if I'm looking for fresh perspectives, an efficient solution is to start with the pieces selected daily by Abnormal Returns.

My best practice is to go with an assumption:  Somewhere in the collection of daily links, there is something I should know to help with my idea generation.  My job is to scan the array of links and articles and find the one, two, three items that provide me with a fresh perspective.  I don't leave the site until I have found content that can feed my brain.  So, for instance, this morning, I was checking out articles on housing starts, inflation, and the distribution of returns across market sectors.  I am very interested in the expectations of traders vs. what markets are actually telling us and pricing in.

Now suppose each of us that has a go-to site that feeds the head offers their favorite site in the comments section for this blog entry, along with a short summary of how they find the site useful.  Across the readership crowd, we should be able to source good information that can prove useful to understanding markets and trading.  So please feel free to share your favorite sites as a comment below and I will follow up with a post that pulls together the ideas.  

Thanks!

Brett

Further Reading:  Five Virtues and Best Practices